WildfiresAdvancements in technology making it easier to fight wildfires

Following the Arizona wildfire disaster, many have been suggesting that new regulations are needed to control the spread of wildfires. Experts say that advancements in technology may well offer a more effective approach to saving lives and making it easier for firefighters to control wild blazes.

The New York Times reports that the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) manages 193 million acres, but can only thin out two to three million acres a year through low-tech options such as controlled burns and removing small trees and shrubs. In some places the USFS even employs goats which eat the shrubs..

In 2007 the USFS andNASA teamed up to useIkhana aircraft, a modified version of the Predator drone fitted with infrared sensors, which flew out of the space agency’s Dryden Flight Research Center in California. 

The infrared sensors kept track of the movement of fires which would otherwise have been obscured by smoke. Since then the USFS has used the drone to fly over other widfires and take photos to discover where it will shift next. These images are usually sent directly to iPads and Android tablets carried by firefighters.

“That information could all be available on mobile devices in real time so folks could reference that periodically as they’re out in the field fighting the fire,” Tim Sexton, who manages the Forest Service’s Wildland Fire Management Research, Development and Application program, told the Times.

Robert Roth, an aviation management specialist for the Forest Service, says there are no plans to deploy more drones while the agency weighs the options, risks, and costs of various approaches. The agency has even considered using manned airplanes.

“We didn’t jump and pick an airplane,” Roth told the Times. “We’re going to determine the missions that we need to fly first, and then see what aircraft can meet those mission requirements.”

The USFS is also using computer simulations which factor in vegetation, topography, and weather patterns, past and present, to set tens of thousands of virtual fires.

“You would sort of get a map that depicts a likelihood of fire occurrence,” Elizabeth Reinhardt, an assistant director of fire ecology and fuels for the USFS, told the Times.

The agency is now considering the use of software and applications tailored to firefighting. According to Laura Hill, an information technology strategic planner for the USFS, the agency wants to take advantage of cloud services to make computer models more available.

One problem with that idea however, is that most wildfires occur in areas that do not have cellphone towers.

“The real big stumbling block we’ve got right now that we’ve got to solve is how to get Internet connectivity to every fire every time,” Sexton said..

As for the future, Sexton believes the USFS could one day implement a system in which people in the command post would be able to use GPS satellites to see the position of each firefighter and the spread of a fire, allowing them to calculate safe zones for firefighters to retreat to and determine how long it would take to get an injured firefighter medical care.

“We could remotely look at the locations of firefighters in relationship to where the fire is and the heat signature that it’s producing, and perhaps anticipate movement of the fires before it reaches the crews,” Sexton told the Times. “Sometimes it comes over a ridge, and the crews can’t see it coming.”